Into a Dangerous Mind (6 page)

“What does the FBI need with a suburban house, Agent Hatcher, and what does that have to do with me?”

Zach laid his hand gently over hers.
 
“We’ll discuss the FBI operation in a minute.
 
For what it’s worth, I highly doubt you have a brain tumor, and please, call me Zach.
 
Agent Hatcher makes me sound about eighty and bald.”

Her pulse scrambled when he touched her, and it took a minute for her system to level.
 
She looked up in time to see his concerned expression and realized she hadn’t said any of her concerns aloud.
 
Then she gasped as she remembered something else from last night.
 
She brought her fingers to her lips in a lame attempt to hide the heat that filled her face.

Zach cleared his throat, then looked her in the eye.
 
“Don’t worry about it, Miss James, you were in a state of shock when I found you.
 
Not that I’m complaining about having a beautiful woman kiss me senseless in her bedroom.”

He grinned around his coffee cup and she couldn’t help but smile in return.
 
Cassidy sighed, she could definitely get used to a handsome man complimenting her over coffee every morning.

.

The events of last night still swirled inside her head like a clash between a nightmare and an erotic fantasy.
 
She decided to start getting some answers.
 
“Agent Hatcher.
 
Zach,” she relented when he cocked his eyebrow.
 
“How’d you know what I was thinking?
 
How did you get inside my head?”

.
 
She picked up her coffee and sipped to give her hands something to do while she waited for an answer.

Zach studied her for a moment.
 
“Are you ready to talk about this?
 
You may want to eat something first and then we can talk.”

His reasonable tone grated on her nerves.
 
“I can do both.”
 
She hated the stubborn bite to her voice.
 
She squared her shoulders, picked up her fork, and stabbed a fat sausage to demonstrate her words.
 
“Please,” she said softly.
 
“I need to understand what’s going on, it’s very unsettling for me not to.”

He looked at her a moment longer, nodded, took a drink of his coffee, and wiped his hands on his napkin.
 
“Okay, I can see you’re going to struggle with this a bit, so let me start at the beginning so you’ll have some framework for your understanding.”

Cassidy nodded and continued to eat, waiting patiently while he gathered his thoughts.

and she nodded for him to continue.

“Lots of people have some amount of small psychic talent which would manifest itself as hunches that proved true, or those bad feelings people get before something happens to a relative or loved one.”

He stopped and pierced her with his gaze, his golden-cognac gaze boring into her.
 
“But more rarely, people have the potential for greater abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, psychic healing, empathy, remote viewing, or a number of other gifts in varying degrees.”

“Okay, but what does that have to do with me?”
 
She pushed her plate away.
 
“I don’t have any of those things.
 
And assuming I even believed they exist outside of the Sci-fi channel, I don’t understand how they’re relevant to what happened to me last night.”

, if you will, to that potential is closed.
 
Sometimes something happens to open it, such as a traumatic experience, an accident, a conscious effort to enhance the ability or…” he paused meaningfully and laid his hand over hers, “it can be opened by someone else with psychic abilities.”

The knowledge of what happened seeped into her consciousness, but she pushed it brusquely aside.
 
“Tell me.”
 
She crossed her arms as a barrier of protection against his next words.

“When you came stumbling across your front yard last night, it was because Brian August forcefully opened the door to your abilities.
 
Among those with the gift, what he did to you is considered a very real kind of rape, and it leaves just as many emotional scars.
 
And only because you were more powerful than he imagined, did he leave the job half done.”

Her mouth hung open as she digested everything he’d said, and she couldn’t seem to close it.
 
Her internal alarms had been right—and she hadn’t listened.
 
Brian, for all intents and purposes had mind raped her on a deserted terrace outside a high-class restaurant in the middle of
Phoenix
.
 
Now Zach wanted her to believe she had some powerful mind gift?

Laughter threatened to bubble up and spill out of her at the absurdity of it all.
 
She could admit, if only to herself, she’d always believed in hunches, and she relied heavily on her internal alarm systems to keep her out of trouble.
 
But the idea she had any of the gifts he described was both frightening and exciting.

Zach continued.
 
“When I found you in the front yard, he was trying from a distance, not really to finish the job, but to cause you pain.”
 
He reached out and touched her cheek gently.
 
“He awakened your ability, left you no way to know how to deal with it and continued to try to hurt you.”
 
He took a slow breath as if trying to shed the anger that had come into his voice.

“So, once I had your permission, I thrust him out—which will hopefully leave him with a huge headache—and I put up psychic shields around you until the Tylenol PM kicked in and turned off your mind.
 
Those psychic barriers kept him from getting inside your mind again.”

Cassidy studied him for a moment, letting the silence hang in the air around them.
 
“For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe everything you’ve told me so far.
 
How does the FBI fit into this?
 
Not that I’m complaining about you saving me out there last night.
 
But you suddenly becoming my neighbor right before I need someone with a rare psychic gift is a little far fetched, don’t you think?”

Zach reached out for the coffee pot and refilled both their cups before answering.
 
“You’re handling this much better than most people would.
 
You’re an adapter, that’s good, you’ll need to be.”

She brushed past the compliment.
 
“What about my question?”

Zach took a deep breath and let the air out in a whoosh.
 
“You’re right.
 
It’s not a coincidence I’m here.
 
Four women have been murdered.
 
All of them died as a result of psychic trauma—like the trauma you experienced last night.
 
We’ve been following Brian August…”

Cassidy cut him off with a sharp wave of her hand.
 
“The man last night at the taxi stand said something about a Reaper, and I couldn’t make any sense of it.
 
Is that what the FBI is calling Brian?
 
The Reaper?”

Zach answered her calmly.
 
“The Reaper is the FBI codename given to this case because the man who called in to take credit for the murders called himself The Reaper.
 
But Agent Gerald, the man at the taxi stand last night, didn’t say anything about the Reaper to you.
 
He thought it.”

Cassidy’s mouth fell open again and she hastily closed it.

Cold pinpricks of fear marched up her spine at what could have happened last night.
 
She swallowed hard.
 
“So, if the FBI knew about Brian, why didn’t they stop me from going out with him?”

“Well, we had a theory it was August, but no hard facts.”

Cassidy leaned back in her chair, took a deep breath and let Zach fill her in on how they narrowed down the potential victims.

When he finished, the cold pinpricks had become a flood of fear surging through her system.
 
“So, he’s in FBI custody now?”

Zach couldn’t quite meet her gaze as he answered.
 
“No.
 
After you got done with him, he went to the emergency room.
 
We lost him there.”

Suddenly she felt as if she were trying to breathe through thick plastic.
 
She couldn’t pull enough air into her lungs, and fear welled up heavy and thick inside her chest.
 
“He could still come after me, couldn’t he?”

Zach nodded.

Cassidy rubbed her hands up and down her arms to chase away the bone deep chill.

“You said emergency room—right?”
 
At Zach’s nod, she continued.
 
“Did I at least break the bastard’s nose?”

Zach’s boisterous laugh echoed throughout the kitchen.
 
“Here I’m worried that you’re going back into shock on me, and you want to know if you broke his nose.
 
I think you and I will get along just fine, Cassidy James.”

“Well?” she persisted.
 
“Did I kick the holy crap out of him?”

Zach’s gaze danced with amusement.
 
“Oh, yeah.
 
A broken nose and bruised ribs.”

“Good.”
 
Female satisfaction of at least leaving him with some scars from the night, too, surged through her.
 
Swallowing the last of her coffee, she looked up.
 
“Okay, secret agent man, where do we go from here?”

“First, we need to keep you safe.
 
Probably the best way for me to do that would be to keep you under twenty-four by seven surveillance.”